In the year 2000 I thought of the internet as a huge department store, you could get lost in the banal commercial arena that the world wide web seems at first to be. As I was doing the searching/researching process, I copied and pasted images and text and collaged them together into a narrative. The main character was called mrs L. and the tale reflects the working process, ending with mrs L. and her friend trying, but never quite able, to finish an index.
View Project – (you will need to enable pop up windows)
Error 404 was a commission from e-2 for a project they were doing called Containership where they were asking artists who weren’t net artists. I’d never been on the web before, so the project was partly about a naïve navigation of cyber space and I tried to treat the internet as the real world, a physical space. I started surfing by taking some addresses from the bookmarks on a public library computer, random starting points in cyberspace, and I just let one website lead me to another. I worked with Pete Edwards to compose an animation of all these different fragments to tell this story. The piece is a 20 minute duration ‘composition’, and isn’t interactive; the pop up and moving windows fill up each viewer’s desktop, rendering the viewer more passive than usual. There is a central text that types out the main story letter by letter , and the other images and texts pop onto the screen and move around, seemingly taking over the desktop. I made a diagram/drawing to map out the composition for Pete and that has been shown in Amsterdam. The website was launched at the Lux in London.
Date
2000
Commissioner and venues
Commissioned by e-2
The Lux, London
XXIst Century Female Century, Mediarama New Media Festival, Sevilla, Spain
Borderline, Veemvloer, Amsterdam
Media
Drawing
Internet intervention programmed by E-2 Pete Edwards
Funder
Arts Council England New Media Projects Fund
Links
Credits
Technical Director Peter Edwards
Thanks to Simon Faithfull
Archive
- the drawing, scans of drawing
- a video documentation of the internet based work (coming soon thanks to Pete Edwards)
Text online
Mrs L. started out in the world’s most extensive department store… they had everything. She worked in first one department then another.General Merchandise laid the rules for all further desk jobs within the company, so she started there.While sitting down one day a person called her for information…this voice belonged to a man who was extremely interesting. Back to Mrs.L at her desk in the world’s largest department store…as she put down the phone she pulled her address book out of the drawer and went to A for Anna K….She added it and scanned through the other people in the list. There were a total of 6584.Her mind drifted absentmindedly and she slept….God Bless You All!!! suddenly woke her up…. it was Princess Bride. She asked Mrs. L”Do you believe in heaven?”…and went on proclaiming.Years later Mrs L was living in the UK. She was working as import agent for a company in the Ukraine and one day found herself trying to translate the text for a new product catalogue.This product had been imported by Mrs L in response to a valuable source of information that she had come across while working in the world’s largest department store.Her correspondence over this period threw some light on her choice of import business.There has been no trace of the ‘pencil’ and much speculation about the darkened glasses and the comet; was there a connection?A large bundle of cards was found, all carefully kept and wrapped in clingfilm…Few of the cards were signed, and many had different handwriting. They appeared to be kept in some sort of chronological order… The images on the front of the post cards were a fine selection: some of the usual subjects…and at the end of the bundle they became increasingly intriguing…. for example a postcard read….There was a whole series ostensibly about paper foldingAnd yet another which seemed to answer the question on a previous postcard…One postcard had written in capital letters…Lodged in between the postcard bundle was a piece of thin computer printout paper.It had the following words on it…The consequence of looking at all these cards left Mrs.L’s biographer feeling as if there were 1000 people chatting in her head. This would not be the last time she felt this way…The biographer Ms. A-Z was working for an agency called ‘Find Exciting People.’Her work was very involving. She had the ability to look into the past, present and future and specialised in dealing with problems involving runaways and missing persons.She also possessed the ability to contact the dearly departed.The biographer Ms A-Z finally, began to write some notes…”Mrs.L was born and raised in the magical city of New O; with a doctorate in meta-physics as well as degree in Radio/TV/Film production, Mrs.L has striven to bring an understanding of the metaphysical realms to the public through radio, television, print, and she once won $10,000 in time to avoid serious medical problems.” Mrs L had contributed the following articles to ‘Myths And Facts’ magazine.The articles reveal a sincere quest into a series of interrelated subjects…Certain quotations which touch on key thoughts are seen below, in the only remaining copies of the magazines as cuttings made by Mrs L herself…Ms. A-Z was an intrepid biographer wishing to see no stone unturned…with a MINOX CAMERA she had made a photographic record of the study occupied by Mrs L over this late period when her dealings became rather furtive or even circumspect…On the nearest bookshelf one could just make out the following titles…it just so happened that the biographer had a copy of this CIA book herself, she had thought it prudent to be aware of such things… she was able to cross reference in greater detail…the chapter headings were as followsIt went like this…Mrs L is on the move once again… we find her in an airport in front of a set of screens…The business is branching out into worldwide distribution and she is researching the airline’sCargo Destinations.She has typed in her query and receives the following printout detailsMany years later Ms. A-Z noticed on the bottom of this list of destinations in the ledger:In this same ledger Ms. A-Z found some notes/letters believed to be from Mrs L’s little known daughter. It was on a completely different level to the rest of Mrs L’s correspondence.And a snapshot with the following in biro on the back a card saying ‘I have a bat in my chimney’ had stapled to the back of it a printout with the following instructions on it…Ms. A-Z wrote well. She accompanied her research with detailed anecdotes…Mrs L is enlarging her import business to worldwide distribution and it was this never ending process that gave her a really bad headache… she tried everything to rid herself of these wicked headaches.She has joined a club to do with her business, there are some interesting characters in it…she gets to know them out of curiosity, while they sit and relax inthe club room. A person called Kurt K. speaks incessantly about the New World OrderMrs L secretly wishes to speak on subjects like Miscellaneous Miscellaneous; an obscure esoteric class she had done at school years ago. It had inspired her with a love of things diverse and miscellaneous… but instead she answers him back with some tales of volcanoes and meteorite impacts…They end up rambling on a bit… Mrs L telling him not long after a reply comes…unable to take any more Mrs L departs quickly she has a dream full of Abandoned Memories and Missing Characters…She remembers lots of people and what they’re saying clear as the light of dayWhen she awakes her mind goes at once to the job in hand and how it all began…and in between typing endlessly she learned more and more about Mrs Ls very hidden talent of predicting the future and the “King of Frightfulness” descending from the sky (presumably in France)The significance of the events she chose was in the subjects, revisited so many times via Mrs L’s biography: travel, exploration, communications, weapons, and photography and the weatherMrs A-Z took off her headphones and though about Mrs L going back to the root of it all, her tenacity, her enormous archive and status as a nobody then she started on the index.